Maria Maria: A Family Tradition // INFLUENCE Magazine
Maria Maria: A Family Tradition // INFLUENCE Magazine
INFLUENCE Magazine assigned us to photograph a feature on Maria Maria for their Spring 2024 "Food" section. The story, written by Rochelle Goff, profiled the family-owned Mexican restaurant and its founders, and our assignment took us to the restaurant in Tallahassee for a combination of food photography and environmental portraits.
Restaurant photography that combines food and people is one of the more demanding editorial assignments because you're managing two completely different types of photography in a single session. The food needs to look its best, the people need to feel natural in their space, and both need to work together across a multi-page magazine layout. At Maria Maria, we were photographing the dishes, the interior of the restaurant, and the family behind it, which means every part of the session required a different approach.
For the food photography, timing and coordination with the kitchen are everything. Dishes like tostadas, chile rellenos, and tamales are best photographed within minutes of being plated. The textures, the colors, and the way sauces and toppings sit on the plate all change quickly, so you need to be set up and ready before the food comes out. We used Profoto lighting to give us consistent control over how each dish was lit, ensuring the colors and details read accurately regardless of the restaurant's ambient conditions. We worked with Canon lenses that let us get close on the plating details while also pulling back for wider compositions that showed the dishes in context.
The environmental portraits of the Gamez family and staff needed to feel connected to the restaurant itself. Maria Maria has a casual, welcoming interior with brick walls and wood tables, and the images needed to reflect that character. As Tallahassee photographers, we've photographed a number of local restaurants for editorial features, and the ones that are family-run have a particular energy that comes through when you let the people interact naturally in their space rather than over-posing them.
Food and restaurant photography in Tallahassee is a growing part of our editorial work, and features like this one for INFLUENCE Magazine are a great example of the range of stories the publication covers beyond politics. We enjoy assignments that let us document the local food scene and the people building it, and Maria Maria's story is exactly the kind of feature that reminds us why we love photography in Tallahassee.
This feature was photographed by The Workmans for INFLUENCE Magazine and appeared in the Spring 2024 issue and was written by Rochelle Goff. The Workmans are a husband-and-wife photography team based in Tallahassee, Florida, and we work with publications across the state of Florida, in Washington D.C. and around the United States. You can explore more of our editorial photography in the archive, see more of our work across our website and connect with us on how we can best serve you!
